PH345: Winter 2025
Which color appears most often?
Which color appears most often?
Aesthetics or encodings are ways that we map data to visual properties of the plot and include position, color, length, shape, area, volume
Choice of aesthetics helps or hinders your audience’s understanding of what the data are showing
One proportion for each of five groups (A-E)
For each of 9 plots, guess group B’s numerical proportion and rank. Enter your guesses on this google form:
| Plot | True value B | True rank B |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.160 | 3 |
| 2 | 0.205 | 3 |
| 3 | 0.333 | 5 |
| 4 | 0.365 | 5 |
| 5 | 0.254 | 4 |
| 6 | 0.161 | 2 |
| 7 | 0.283 | 4 |
| 8 | 0.034 | 1 |
| 9 | 0.098 | 2 |
Take away: some aesthetics communicate data better than others
Figure 14 from Mackinlay (1986)
Sr. Director at Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
Formerly Creative Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at Hopkins
Published monthly column on data visualization in Nature Methods journal from 2010-2012
Different visual variables encoding the same five values.
Figure 1c from Wong (2010a)
What is the rate of change of atmospheric CO2 over time?
Figure 6 from Cleveland and McGill (1985)
What is the relative size of big vs small circle?
14x
How does distance between lines vary?
it’s constant
Figure 1c from Wong (2010a)
Figure 15 from Mackinlay (1986)
Lines in graphs create clear connection. Enclosure is an effective way to draw attention to a group of objects.
Figure 2b from Wong (2010b)
What regions of the US experienced greatest population growth?
Figure 4.2, Wilke (2019)
Cleveland, W.S. and McGill, R., 1985. Graphical perception and graphical methods for analyzing scientific data. Science, 229(4716), pp.828-833.
Mackinlay, J., 1986. Automating the design of graphical presentations of relational information. Acm Transactions On Graphics (Tog), 5(2), pp.110-141.
Wehrli, U., 2003. Tidying Up Art. Prestel Publishing.
Wilke, C.O., 2019. Fundamentals of data visualization: a primer on making informative and compelling figures. O’Reilly Media.
Wong, B., 2010a. Design of data figures. Nature Methods, 7(9), pp.665-666.
Wong, B., 2010b. Points of view: Gestalt principles (Part 1). Nature Methods, 7(11), p.863.